Fay Wood

Studio #15

Art using found objects has attracted Wood since about 1965, when she was living in the San Francisco Bay area and saw large sculptures made from found objects lying on the edges of the Bay. They were fantastic, noisy, beautiful works with a great sense of humor and form. She has never forgotten them.  As an art student at Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, Wood began studying painting, but upon meeting Jasmine Saunders, a local sculptor, who encouraged her to carve directly in wood, she began what has become a deep love for sculpture and found object assemblage. In 1992, having set up a permanent studio in the Hudson Valley of New York, she began combining objects with the carvings she had been doing – and has never stopped. Wood uses vintage wood objects, and has a series using metal, and has found pleasure in layering found rag paper over metal and wire armatures, adding interesting bits and pieces to the mix. She tends to be a traditionalist in that she likes to make works that have permanence and are unique. She follows a quote by Virginia Woolf: “Arrange whatever pieces come your way”. She paints on canvas and glass creating tapestry with found objects.  Recently, with a move to a new studio Wood had difficulty adjusting to the space she wanted to use for drawing. She has abandoned drawing for the moment, and has begun to make collage from a large collection of found materials she has amassed over the years.

Wood has an extensive exhibition history including a prize-winning sculpture in one of the National Sculpture Society’s annual exhibitions, as well as the Florence Biennale, Florence, Italy, in which she was invited to participate again in 2019. She was also selected for the “TIME, SPACE, EXISTENCE” exhibition hosted by the European Cultural Centre as part of the 2018 Venice Architectural Biennale in Venice, Italy. She has been a featured artist representing “Artrepreneur”, an online artist’s website in a film to be shown worldwide on PBS. This summer she joined the 2020 Saugerties Artists’ Studio Virtual Tour.